Furthermore, the fact that the Soviet Union joined the victorious Allies in World War II enhanced the prestige of the statist economic system the Bolsheviks had put in place. Had not that system allowed the Soviets to lead a notoriously backward country, which in 1917 had only just emerged from serfdom, on a forced march to industrialization? In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter believed that socialism would inevitably triumph over capitalism. In 1970, when Paul Samuelson published the eighth edition of his famous textbook, he was still predicting that the GDP of the Soviet Union might outstrip that of
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